82. Name it and Claim It: The History of Prosperity Gospel
On October 20 in Conroe, Texas, a pastor laid hands on Ken Paxton and prayed that God would "give him favor with voters." Two days later a dozen Catholic bishops were filmed praying over Donald Trump in the Oval Office with Paula White-Cain standing behind the chair. Two weeks before that, Jim Bakker died. This episode traces the idea underneath all three: that success is God's verdict on a man.It starts with a clockmaker in Belfast, Maine, in 1838. Phineas Quimby decided disease was an error of belief, his patient Mary Baker Eddy turned that into Christian Science, and a fired editor named Emma Curtis Hopkins turned it into New Thought, ordaining twenty women in her first class in 1889 and training the founders of Unity, Divine Science, and Religious Science. Then the men moved in. Ralph Waldo Trine, Napoleon Hill (whose Carnegie meeting no archive can find), Bruce Barton's Jesus as "the founder of modern business," and Norman Vincent Peale, who married Donald and Ivana Trump in 1977 and whom Trump still calls his teacher.Alongside it, the gospel of wealth: Russell Conwell's "it is your duty to get rich," delivered 6,152 times. The frontier panic of Turner and Roosevelt, the Men and Religion Forward Movement of 1911, and Billy Sunday's war on "effeminate" Christianity, all arriving as women organized to vote. Fundamentalism, paid for by Union Oil's Lyman Stewart. And E. W. Kenyon, who learned mind-cure at a Boston elocution school and passed it, word for word, to Kenneth Hagin of McKinney, Texas, Paxton's hometown. From Hagin: Copeland, seed-faith, Osteen, Paula White, and a 2006 poll in which 61 percent of American Christians said God wants people to be rich.SourcesKate Bowler, Blessed (Oxford, 2013)Beryl Satter, Each Mind a Kingdom (University of California Press, 1999)Catherine Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit (Yale, 2007)Gail Harley, Emma Curtis Hopkins: Forgotten Founder of New Thought (Syracuse, 2002)Donald Meyer, The Positive Thinkers (Doubleday, 1965)Richard Weiss, The American Myth of Success (Basic Books, 1969)Mitch Horowitz, One Simple Idea (Crown, 2014)D. R. McConnell, A Different Gospel (Hendrickson, 1988)George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (Oxford, 1980)Darren Dochuk, Anointed with Oil (Basic Books, 2019)Kevin Kruse, One Nation Under God (Basic Books, 2015)Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne (Liveright, 2020)Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (Knopf, 1977)David Edwin Harrell Jr., Oral Roberts: An American Life (Indiana, 1985)Carol V. R. George, God's Salesman (Oxford, 1993)David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie (Penguin, 2006)William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Lectures IV–VRussell Conwell, Acres of Diamonds; Andrew Carnegie, "Wealth," North American Review, June 1889Ralph Waldo Trine, In Tune with the Infinite (1897); Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich (1937); Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows (1925)Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking (1952); Oral Roberts, The Miracle of Seed-Faith (1970); Kenneth Hagin, You Can Have What You Say (1979); Kenneth Copeland, The Laws of Prosperity (1974); Marabel Morgan, The Total Woman (1973); Joel Osteen, Your Best Life Now (2004)Matt Novak, "The Untold Story of Napoleon Hill," Gizmodo, Dec. 2016Time, "Does God Want You to Be Rich?" Sept. 10, 2006Texas House Resolution 2377, May 27, 2023; Texas Senate Court of Impeachment, Sept. 2023Angela Paxton, petition for divorce, Collin County, July 10, 2025Ballotpedia and NBC News, Texas Senate runoff results, May 26–27, 2026Fox News, Angela Paxton at the Texas Federation of Republican Women, Sept. 23, 2026
